You’d Better Start Freaking Out

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Atheism is settled science – there is no god, there are no gods, there is nothing on that matter to discuss, give all that nonsense a rest, and get down to the real urgent matters of cognitive distress – and the litany is intact, stronger than ever, all defined by the depraved working of our supersystem.

Climate catastrophe lies just beyond polite conversation, but it is up on the Top Ten list of that litany, and currently going gangbusters in the reduction of sea ice in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. WordPress should be able to provide a safe haven for the mass of fairly knowledgeable humans to pen climate catastrophe freakouts, but this one harbinged doom is not the only destroyer of the reality of a better and inhabitable social world. The supersystem is infected by common invasions of corruption and irrational violence that constitute the working operations of anti-human social institutions. Economic inequality has many historical and on-going causes, but it too imperils the very hopes of poor and non-privileged people that there is any rational way for them to escape the crushing burdens of under-employment and debt peonage. The global wars of empire are in a technowar phase of staggering reach and ill effect, killing the poor peoples of the oil- and energy-resource desert oases of the condemned Middle East. The prisons and shanty-towns and refugee confinements of the greater world are not minor irritations to the glory of a rich global regime of corporate capitalism, but are its dominant mode of living.

With these and other interconnected sources of social horror part of our rational and emotional bases of knowledge and thought, what goes into the practice of living? Simple denial that there is going to be anything wrong in our own sun-selected lives? Self-maintaining words of endemic happiness and supreme adaptability? The words that others say or type or depict are not necessarily reflective of their interior mental monologues. They could proclaim indifference, or some faithiest and bizarre trust in a “loving” and care-taking deity, all the birds-on-a-wire warbling and pontificating overlaid upon the internal reality of a brain in daily psychic freakout over the evident mounting crises outside the door and computer screen.

No, “things are not going to be all right.” Neither are these end times, or imminent doom. Humans are built to be heroes, supremely crafty and untrustworthy survival artists, stepping through the muck and mire to keep another dawn coming. This pop-tech western interregnum was fairly strange and mostly antithetical to that basic nature of humanity, but we are encountering a much more threatened social world than any parent or professor or Nobel Laureate or literary pantheonista could ever have forecast. That was not within their powers, but it will be within ours, as we get set for four of the most stupid years any empire has yet endured on its way down to decrepitude.